MUNCIE – A multi-year, multi-million-dollar redevelopment that would include not only new businesses but a new greenway trailhead and new entrance to the city has been proposed by a group of civic and business leaders.

The plan — detailed Tuesday for The Star Press — would take 50 acres of brownfield land where Indiana Steel and Wire once operated on East Jackson Street/Ind. 32 and redevelop it as a business park anchored by South Carolina businessman Gary Dannar's proposed assembly plant for his rolling power vehicles.

But equally important to the site — which has been dubbed Kitselman Gateway and the Kitselman Pure Energy Park, after the pioneering Muncie industrial family that owned the predecessor to Indiana Steel and Wire — is a new Cardinal Greenways trailhead.

The project as outlined Tuesday is complex, to say the least, and there's no price tag for it yet. The work will take a first step at 10 a.m. Thursday, when Dannar goes to the Muncie Industrial Revolving Loan Fund board to ask for a $450,000 loan.

The scope of development, although it has been discussed among the principals for two years, is yet to be determined. Todd Donati, director of the Muncie Redevelopment Commission, said a 100,000-square-foot building for Dannar could cost up to $5 million to build, and Dannar's building is one of several included in early drawings showing the park's layout.

"It's millions," Donati said. Early construction could begin in 2016.

Dannar — who has been operating out of a northside industrial facility for more than a year — said he still intends to employ nearly 500 people after five years building his Mobile Power Station vehicles. But Dannar's facility is just one small part of a project that includes:

• Reclamation of 50 acres of former Indiana Steel and Wire property, north and south of East Jackson Street. It is property that a Dannar partnership is buying from the current owner, GK Technologies, and has contamination from a century of wire-making that ended in 2002. Principals in the new project — Dannar and partners working as KPEP LLC — said they could not disclose the cost of purchasing the land from GK. Six feet of soil will be spread over the site to further buffer contamination.

• A new Indiana Department of Transportation bridge to carry East Jackson/Ind. 32 over White River. More than 17,000 vehicles travel the route each day.

• A new Cardinal Greenway trailhead, called the Kitselman Trailhead, on the south side of Jackson Street, making the Ind. 32 crossing safer for pedestrians and bicyclists accessing the nearby John Craddock Wetland. The development would include an historic bridge relocated from the Albany area.

• A new city shell building that would join Dannar's future assembly plant and several other buildings in the Kitselman Pure Energy Park on the north side of Jackson Street.

• Housing redevelopment to the east of the property and improvements to Leland Avenue to allow truck traffic into the park.

All the participants emphasized that the project's elements were aimed at attracting not only development like Dannar's but reusing old industrial property to create jobs, housing and trail amenities that can attract young, urban-oriented workers.

Dannar said the six feet of soil over the Indiana Steel and Wire property would take care of contamination concerns there. Other property south of Jackson is "clean," Dannar said.

An IDEM spokesman told The Star Press on Tuesday that former wire mill site is still in remediation and the redvelopment plan is "presently in the review process."

Besides Dannar, participants in the Tuesday interview with The Star Press detailing the project included Donati, attorney James Borgmann, Phil Tevis of city consulting firm Flatland Resources, retired city water quality director John Craddock, for whom the adjacent wetland is named, and Angie Poole, CEO of Cardinal Greenways.

Contact Keith Roysdon at 765-213-5828 and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.